We meet The Ghost (an unnamed British author played by Ewan McGregor) as he signs on to edit the existing manuscript of Adam Lang’s memoir. It seems the original ghostwriter has drowned under mysterious circumstances, and the publishing house needs someone to spend a month polishing the manuscript into a bestseller. The Ghost is unable to resist a £250,000 advance, and quickly travels to Martha’s Vineyard, the American residence of the former prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan).

But despite the Ghost’s initial attempts to maintain a professional distance, he soon finds that Lang has ghosts of his own. For one, evidence has surfaced that while in power Lang may have ordered the torture of war criminals. Lang claims innocence, but won’t leave the United States, the only country that doesn’t recognize the authority of the International Court of Justice. The Ghost wonders what else Lang might be capable of, and begins doing his own research beyond the text of the original memoir, investigating leads that sent the former ghostwriter to his watery grave.

Richard Harris adapted the script from his own novel, The Ghost, and has been quite open in interviews of the parallels he intended between Adam Lang and Tony Blair, portraying Lang as an inept politician removed from the realities of daily life. Harris, who himself had worked for Tony Blair, allows his Hitchcockian plot to unfold gradually, building to a startling conclusion with grave, real-world implications.

Ewan McGregor plays The Ghost as a likeable everyman with a sense of humor about the strangeness of his working conditions. Both he and Pierce Brosnan, who plays Lang as an innocuous ditz, are overshadowed by performances by the supporting cast. Olivia Williams (The Sixth Sense, An Education) gives Ruth Lang a fierce intellectualism and mature sensuality. Kim Cattrall (Sex and the City) gives an understand performance as Lang’s political manger/mistress, her talents making up for an iffy British accent. There are also memorable cameos by James Belushi, Tom Wilkinson, and the Actors Studio legend Eli Wallach.

Polanski is a perfectionist, and each frame of The Ghost Writer has the polish of a man who has been directing dark thrillers for nearly fifty years. The images in The Ghost Writer are crisp, clean, and tense. One of the standout shots seems right out of a Hitchcock film: the camera follows a note as it’s passed from hand to hand at a party, as the audience anxiously awaits the reaction its contents will have on its recipient. (Image 11)

The Ghost Writer also features one of the best film scores of the year. Inspired by Bernard Hermann scores like North by Northwest and full of twinkling bells and fast tempos, it adds a nervous excitement to the film, and generally makes the entire venture more entertaining. Alexandre Desplat is quickly becoming one of the best composers working today, adding The Ghost Writer to his lengthy list of excellent film scores, which includes such varied work as the music for The Queen, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Gold Compass, as well as the more recent A Prophet, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and Julie & Julia.

Another impressive aspect of the film is that if you didn’t already know the film was shot on a small island off the coast of Germany, you would easily believe the locations to be within Martha’s Vineyard. Polanski, unable to shoot in th e United States or England, replaced all the street signs, cars, and other telling factors to recreate a New England setting for his film, going so far as to hire American extras to be seen in the background.

Roman Polanski’s gotten more attention lately for his personal history than his films, but in his seventies, he still producing films that assure his rank as one of the best directors still working today. He tells stories from the perspective of a man who views the present through the lens of a haunted past, and The Ghost Writer is a perfect fit for this sensibility.